Where have I been? Answer: Customers & Innovation

Last night a friend asked me how long it’s been since I last did a blog post? I suggested a few weeks, but to my horror it has been over 120 days…Yikes! “Hello, McFly…anyone home…start typing?”

Let me start by rewinding a bit, as we have some catching up to do. We had another epic summer here at SOASTA. Beyond the customer and employee growth we’ve been experiencing this past year, it has been incredibly rewarding for all of us at SOASTA to see how “Cloud Testing” has become such a “game changer” in the area of performance management. Since we introduced this innovative approach (in 2006) for delivering web application performance, thousands of individuals and hundreds of companies are now cloud testing using a variety of new tools that have hit the market in the past year. We here at SOASTA now boast of having over 200 customers. Many of these are Global 2000 companies in media, entertainment, retail and finance. All of which are now having their web sites “SOASTA Certified” for performance. Our fantastic growth appears to be fueled by several factors. First, it is being driven by the enormous success and growth in web applications that are deployed today, and perhaps more importantly by the subsequent fear of the impact should one of these business critical websites fail, once delivered. Second, that many of these new applications are running “heavy”, with dynamic content that at times makes performance sluggish or, even worse, crashes under stress. The speed, affordability, and scale of Cloud Testing has enabled thousands of applications to avoid the performance hurdles of poor design, coding mistakes, bad switch settings or unpredictable traffic spikes; while improving the overall end user experience of several leading consumer sites that we all use. This makes our efforts over the past four years… very rewarding! Who knew that Testing would be such a hot growth market in 2010?

Over the course of the summer (and continuing) I have had the opportunity to visit several countries, states and cities around the globe to talk to our customers, partners and prospects. What I found was that 2010-11 may be one of the most exciting times in my 32 years of experience in technology. There is an enormous “wave of change” going on out there, one not driven by technology or even, as is commonly purported, driven by cloud computing. This “wave” is being driven by new business requirements for reaching a new type of consumer…the mobile consumer. Companies big and small are re-tooling from traditional brick and mortar stores to dynamic digital store fronts (websites). This shift is changing the way IT thinks…they are no longer supporting an end user community of employees, but now it’s a community made up of actual consumers. That Changes Everything! New business needs require new tools. That’s where SOASTA comes in…fueling our growth in the US, Asia and EMEA markets over the past year.

But, we have not only been adding customers and employees, we have also greatly expanded our award winning technology into some interesting new areas, such as Production and Continuous Testing, and Private as well as Public Test Clouds. New products are about to be released that (we believe) will extend our innovation leadership in the performance management arena. On top of all that, the first of our many Technology Patents was recently approved, a crowning achievement for the best engineering team in performance management. We believe this patent, as with the others in process, will have quite an impact in the cloud testing and application performance markets for years to come. And were not done!

We’ve had a great few years here at SOASTA, and the best is yet to come!